THE HARMONISATION OF CRIMINAL LAW: TREATY CRIMES AND ARGENTINEAN CRIMINAL LAW

The internationalization of Criminal Law, i.e., the creation of criminal rules on the basis of instruments of international law, is not a new phenomenon. What is peculiar nowadays is the dimension that this phenomenon has acquired. In this paper, we propose to analyse criminal harmonization through the so-called "treaty crimes", defined as the set of criminal offences established in domestic law as a result of an obligation undertaken by virtue of an international convention to define them. This phenomenon challenges two fundamental ideas of classical Criminal Law. The first of these is that national legislators are the only sovereign actors responsible for the punishment and application of Criminal Law. Secondly, the supposed linking of Criminal Law to the culture of the respective state (Kulturgebundenheit) is an idea that served as a restraint against the importation of criminal law from other criminal systems. To this end, we analyse various international conventions and how the obligations to criminalise have been implemented in Argentinean law.